How “Sincere” Was Steinbeck? Conceptual and Stylistic Arrangements in William T. Vollmann’s The Lucky Star and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

Abstract

 Concentrating on The Lucky Star (2020) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), this paper aims to analyze how William T. Vollmann’s writing style might have benefited from and/or bears resemblance to that of John Steinbeck’s from conceptual and stylistic points of view. In 2009, Vollmann suggested that “Steinbeck was the most American of us all” (260). Interestingly, what seems to fascinate him about Steinbeck is “his sincerity” (Ibid.: 259) – a concept that brings together the novelists’ ideas about America with a kind of empathetic knowledge that aspires to truth and resistance to abusive power. Considering Vollmann’s laudatory observations regarding Steinbeck’s writing, it is worth scrutinizing the linguistic and stylistic strategies that he employs to highlight the moral qualities in his works. Such an analysis indicates resonances between Vollmann’s oeuvre and the “New Sincerity” in American fiction. Furthermore, it helps better understand the affinities between his writing and Steinbeck’s “sincerity”.